Gollum is now fashionably late

 A real maverick, that one.

I am fascinated by the idea of the new upcoming Gollum game, just as I am with this coming slate of Lord of the Rings that appears to be quietly trying to have it's cake and eat it at the same time. To be clear, I'm actually not a huge LoTR head who can rattle off dates and deep lore and characters from the top of my brain jar like some sort of flesh-bound Silmarillion; I'm just some clueless rube who happens to think the story of those books are damn near peerless, the Peter Jackson movies are exceptionally incredible adaptations and that Amazon doesn't quite know how much they're chewing when it comes to their reboot of the franchise. And to be clear, they are very much leaning towards rebooting the whole Lord of the Rings franchise, as much as they're desperately trying to hide that fact by taking the cowards route up to the big events. They're trying to paint their own ancillary stories that nervously skirt around the important book-covered storylines and place a few recognisable names here and there, allowing them to flirt with the world without placing themselves in direct competition with Jackson's work, all to try and get people used to the idea of their remakes before the remakes are made.

I do think it's pretty spineless to approach the whole development process of this remake series as 'LoTR: The Rings of Power' has. Kind of like if Tetsuya Nomura had been too scared to touch the classics he revered in his youth and so made a management sim Final Fantasy game where you played as the investment brokers trying to come together as a conglomerate called 'Shinra' hoping to exploit the bubbling power concerns of the, still mid-construction, city of Midgar. They want the audience to think "Yeah, I guess I can close my eyes and pretend this is an addendum to Peter Jackson's work" before they then come around and try to redo the story of those movies as was their original attention before the fan's scoff-back made them all reconsider. And to be honest, I can kind of see where they're coming from. The Lord of the Rings movies expertly cut through the material to draw not only the most salient, but also the most photogenic and engaging, moments of the book to truncate the immense Lord of the Rings narrative without compromising the heart of the story; that's one tough act to follow.

And this Gollum game has been another tool in that misinformation campaign, and one I've recognised as being particularly egregious in how it's attempted to brook it's independence from the Jackson films. Right from the get go the team have affirmed that Gollum is its own project that bows only to the books as its master, and though I don't know if they've ever played up their relationship to the Amazon TV show, they had planned to release the game alongside the debut of that show so it's pretty clear the two are linked. Yet this messaging conflicts pretty heavily with the visuals we're seeing out of this game from a base level, because lo-and-behold; that is just Andy Serkis' version of Gollum that they're making a game out of. Claiming to be a totally new take on the character, yet actually just nabbing the visual design and even a bit of Andy Serkis' performance. (Yes, reading the same sort of line means there'll be a bit of cross-over no matter who's giving the performance. As such I can overlook those similarities somewhat.)

You might read that and think; "But that's just Gollum, isn't it? They're just bringing Gollum to life, he's obviously going to look like that." but as with many of the visualisations of Lord of The Ring before the Jackson movies will show you; that is nowhere near the case. Gollum is actually described with a lot of room for interpretation in the books, he's slimy and skinny and has huge black eyes. He's ethnically from Hobbiton, but as with perhaps the biggest theme of the story, his corruptive influence, lustful greed has twisted and warped his appearance to be hardly recognisable even by his own kin. If you were to honestly try and make a Gollum without trying to leverage the pre-built movie fanbase to try and play both sides, as it were, there would be any number of potential final looks that your character might have. Just look at the Ralph Bakshi Gollum.

But of course, trying something new is scary when the last guys did such a good job, and it's much easier to just climb on their back and try to build from there. No shade, that's literally something I would do, I just think it would less underhanded if you didn't try to play up the 'considerable' effort that went into designing their unique Gollum who looks identical to the Peter Jackson one with just a few more rogue strands of hair. Be that as it may, I'm pretty sure we're all excited to get a glimpse at whatever nonsense everyone's favourite magpie was up to whilst the forces of evil were shoring up to try and wipe clean the land of man. I'm expecting a sort of 'Thief' style storyline where the narrative is happening around you whilst you're on a selfish trip to get money and interacting with the grander world in a perfunctory fashion almost despite your own wishes. Unfortunately, it's not going to be that simple.

You see, whilst the gods of brand synergy decree that games and movies must come out within a hair's breadth of one-another, sometimes accidents happen. Strike while the franchise is hot only works if the hilariously dissimilar arts of TV show creation and game production line up perfectly and that... well, that's just not likely to happen all too often. What should come as a surprise to no one is the realisation  that Gollum is going to need a few more months in the oven and thus is going to miss the, already determinedly controversial, launch of 'The Rings of Power'. I'm sure that made some executive out there just weeps to know that, although I'm going to take it as a positive because it means the developers aren't chopping off the game's knees in order to score a few cheap recognition bucks, or to literally try and profit off someone else's marketing.

In many ways this is actually perfect for them whatever way the show goes. If it's a great reboot for the series than that's going to push traffic towards their game in the months after enjoying the full show, and if it turns out to be another god awful adaptation like the many we've seen recently, then the visual similarities to the Jackson movies will attract fans nostalgic to the days before the franchise was murdered. Poke as I will at Daedelic Entertainment, they really have masterfully manoeuvred their way into a seemingly infallible position. Then again... Marvel's Avengers did teach us that even with a sure thing that couldn't possible be corrupted, bad corporate decisions can corrupt the incorruptible. Still, unless Gollum starts randomly introducing buyable skins and lootboxes I can't see how they'd mess it up. And if they did, I'd honestly be impressed to see how many skins they could manage to print of Gollum's posing pouch. (I guess they could sell a Tiger print and Zebra stripe variant; but where do you go from there? Lacey silk?)

Now to be fair, after laying down all that shade; I think that in the right hands a very focused narrative following a single character across a lore-rich universe at the edge of a lit tinder box has the potential to be an amazing experience piece in the same vein as 'Brothers: A tale of Two Sons' or The Last Guardian. I don't know whether this team are the right hands, but maybe they will be. I just think there's a air of dishonesty surrounding this which, in fairness, probably did not start at all in their offices but rather from their Amazon brand partners. I just pray at the end of the day that none of this gets in the way of the third 'Shadow of' game which we were all promised, given how that game is now balancing between the Peter Jackson visual style and this stealthy reboot. (Shadow of Middle Earth? I'm spitballing here.)